[ad_1]
You have probably heard the expression hard like nails. Or maybe difficult like an old boot.
How about hard as the bottom of a lobster?
It turns out that the belly of the famous red crustacean is as resistant as industrial rubber, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who have tested this part of the anatomy of the animal.
The experiment, which according to organic physicist Ming Guo, was rather a tasty side dish when it broke with the serious science on the menu of MIT's mechanical engineering department, was triggered by a visit from a friend A few years ago.
"It was actually a visitor from China, who visited my lab for six months and, born in China, he had never had lobster and of course I took him to eat lobster," said Guo, a professor. assistant at MIT. , with a little laugh.
While they were eating, her research colleague noticed how badly the underside of her lobster was.
"It's extremely difficult to chew," Guo said in an interview with MIT on Wednesday afternoon. "And from there, we started playing with it."
The researchers followed a regular diet of red crustaceans and took the tail to their engineering lab for mechanical torture sessions.
"We started cutting (the bottom fabric) lobster and cutting it into strips, and then installing it in our traditional mechanical testing machines to pull it and stretch it with maximum load that he can bear, "said Guo, 36 years old. who did his undergraduate studies at Beijing University, his PhD in Applied Physics at Harvard and started teaching at MIT in 2015.
"We are essentially looking for two important factors: one is the toughness of the material, which consists of stretching a material longer and longer until they are far apart. And the energy that goes into that. How much work do I do to break the sample. And the other important factor is the maximum force that the sample can withstand. "
It turned out that the tenacity level of the 90% water lobster fabric called hydrogel was comparable to the industrial rubber composite used in car tires and garden hoses. Guo's team concluded that the lobster membrane was the most resistant material of all natural hydrogels, including collagen, animal skins and natural rubber.
It's so tough that Mr. Guo said it could be a design guide for a more flexible bulletproof vest, especially for the highly mobile parts of the body such as elbows and knees.
The soft but strong fabric could also serve as a model for a material that would replace damaged muscle tissue in humans, he said.
As a physicist in biology, Guo generally attacks the mechanical problems of the human body, such as the precise forces involved in the movement of cancerous tumors in the organs.
Regarding the lobster study, published in the journal Acta Biometrica, "it was really fun for us".
The team had to endure some jokes from colleagues, but as scientists, "at least they find that interesting," he said with a laugh.
[ad_2]
Source link